I’m currently doing some mapping of animal shelters in Germany and often encounter the situation that there is not object tagged as animal shelter, but multiple e.g. there is a node with amenity=animal-shelter but also a building is tagged this way. I usually try to mark the area of the shelter and tag it with amenity=animal-shelter. I also put all contact data, operator and so on on this object. A good example for this type of mapping is Tierheim Berlin.
Now I encountered Tierheim München where nearly all buildings are tagged with amenity=animal-shelter. The cat house had all the contact information.
What I already did: Map the area as animal shelter and put all the contact information there. I then removed the info from the cat house and changed the office of the association “Tierschutzverein München” from animal shelter to office=ngo.
Now my next step would be to remove the tag amenity=animal-shelter from all the buildings. My reasoning would be, that they are not all individual shelters and they are “just” buildings that belong to that shelter - often with dedicated names. It would not make sense to search for animal shelters and get a list of 20 in the same area that have names liek “Hundehaus 1” and no contact data (or the contact data replicated).
But as this seems to be mapped this way very deliberately I first wanted to get some feedback if you all agree with the general approach before making larger change
building= tags describe the type of building. Often pets waiting adoption are kept in kennels, rather than livestock barns.
pets (which I assume this animal shelter refers to) aren’t livestock, so I don’t think adding cat as a value for livestock= makes sense. Certainly it’s not a value that’s currently in use (livestock=dog does have some small use, though I’m dubious about that).
But I don’t really have a better suggestion.
Probably, I’d consider just using building=yes if you don’t know the actual building type. Or perhaps looking at introducing a tag such as building=kennels?
There’s also the option for office=charity. The boundary between ngo/charity isn’t entirely clear, but I think most animal rescue centres (at least in the UK) fall into the charity rather than ngo classification.
Unfortunately the English language seems to lack a word for a building where any kind of animal (not just farm animals) is kept, like Stall in German, and that’s why we have such a complicated (for non-native English speakers) system where we have a large number of very specific tags for buildings where a specific kind of animal is kept. This discussion and my proposal in it comes to mind. Fortunately for zoo animals kept outdoors or in cages we have zoo=enclosure + animal=* I would prefer generalising this, so we can tag a building as for keeping any animals, with animal=* added to specify which animals (one or several kinds) are kept there.
Unfortunately the English language seems to lack a word for a building where any kind of animal (not just farm animals) is kept, like Stall in German, and that’s why we have such a complicated (for non-native English speakers) system where we have a large number of very specific tags for buildings where a specific kind of animal is kept.
Stall in German isn’t suitable as a word for a building where any animal is kept, not just farm animals. E.g. it doesn’t work for cats, dogs, fish, bees, worms, snakes, butterflies or snails. Neither for turtles.
If we had chosen to use German instead of English as the language on which our tag names and values are based, we would have been able to describe more animal housing buildings with the same tag value. But even German is not flexible enough.
I think our tagging schemes should not be limited by the peculiarities of a natural language. We are lucky to have the word “pitch” in English that describes any place where sports can be played, so we have leisure=pitch + sport=*. But because we are not so lucky to have a general English word for buildings that are built to house animals, we have building=stall, building=sty, building=aviary, etc. I.e. we now need to have a word for the home of each particular animal, and we can’t tag a building that is for housing animals but we don’t know which animal, or we don’t know the English word for such a home because of our limited knowledge of English. I think we should definebuilding=livestock as a building built for housing any animal (not just farm animals), or find a better word than “livestock” that describes any building that is built to keep animals.
I asked on Talk:Tag:building=livestock - OpenStreetMap Wiki a while ago whether it wouldn’t be better to use the singular form, e.g. cat instead of cats and got the answer that livestock=* should indicate the building type rather than a kind of animal. The kind of animal should better be tagged with animal=*, as I understood this. I am not sure, but find the idea interesting.
I’m not a native English speaker, but I rather have the impression that it confuses many native English speakers that in OSM we use leisure=pitch for all sorts of things that they wouldn’t normally call “pitch”.
I’m not sure I agree with this premise. Otherwise we’d just have building=human, or slightly less extreme, just building=residential (instead of house/apartments/etc). The value of the building tag is supposed to describe the physical nature of the building - not necessarily what animal is being housed in it.
A horse’s stable is very different physically to a pig sty. It’s therefore right (based on OSM’s current tagging conventions) that the building value used is different.
I do, however, understand this makes things harder for those who don’t know all the particular English names.
For the issue regarding “Tierheim München”: I now made sure that the amenity:animal_shelter is only used on one object and this is the central object to have contact data. If later this thread or someone else can find a consensus on how the individual buildings can be tagged, I’ll add this as well.
Agree, that would be clearer, and also make it clear that building=livestock is not limited to farm animals (if we decide so).
The shapes buildings for “keeping” humans in are limited in number and mutually exclusive. A building=residential is either a building=apartments OR building=semi-detached OR … The number of types of buildings for keeping animals is larger (could in principle as large as the number of animal species) and several kinds of animals are often kept in the same building. My parents-in-law had a building in their garden housing 20 chicken, 2 pigs, 5 sheep, 5 goats and and a donkey. How to tag such a building? building=chicken_coop;sty;goat_shed;sheepfold;whatever_you_call_a_place_for_a_ donkey? Wouldn’t it be more logical to tag it with building=animal_keeping + animal=chicken;pigs;sheep;goats;donkeys? I could then simply delete the no longer relevant secondary tags now that they only keep chicken in that building. It would also nicely be applicable to buildings with unknown animals, to zoo buildings and to animal shelter buildings.
Towards the end of my example, yes. Fact is that there is no appropriate tag for a building built to accommodate a variety of animals that includes non-livestock animals and that is not on a farm.
I think we’ve now got two issues on the go: animal shelter buildings and purpose built buildings for housing a mixture of animals.
It’s worth remembering that animal shelter in British English refers to a place that temporarily houses donated/discarded animals which are being put up for adoption. It is not a generic name for a shelter (i.e., building/roof) for animals.
Tagging for buildings inside an animal shelter
I’d suggest:
The main campus should be tagged as amenity=animal_shelter. Individual buildings which house animals can be tagged:
building=kennel/stable/yes/* (whatever is most appropriate for the building)
Tagging for buildings purpose built to house a mixture of animals
OK, so what might this look like? If you can provide examples of this sort of building, which aren’t simply stables/kennels/barns/industrial building I think that would be really useful. What sort of features (other than the fact it houses animals since that is building:use) would make that building unique from the other building types which we already have tags for?
If there really is such a type of building, how about something generic like: building=animal_keeping? I think the term animal husbandry is the “proper” term but that’s not going to be very accessible for non-English speakers!
It would be good not to mix up livestock with generic animals, so hopefully we can come up with a more generic name. Or do we just expand the meaning of an existing tag (e.g., livestock) to include this?
Tagging for non-purpose built buildings that house a mixture of animals
Use building:use in a way that matches the above.
In terms of building types, I’m struggling to visualise that beyond something generic like yes or shed. We don’t need a “special” building type tag because it is used for something special; we can tag the building use separately.
